(The Nationalist, 22 April 2005)
Some years ago, I was helping out in a hospital chaplaincy for a few days while the regular chaplain got a break. There was a woman there who was dying of cancer. When I asked her how she was, she said sadly, ‘I’m so lonely; I have no one’.
She was facing the great challenge of life – alone, without the help of another human being. I spent some time with her, but then had to move on to other patients. She probably did not live for very long after, maybe a few weeks or maybe even just a few days.
At the moment when she most needed some human contact, some warmth and affection, someone to talk to her and listen to her, she was alone. I felt that I had let her down.
How did something like that happen? She must have had some relatives somewhere. Are we so self-absorbed, so inward-looking, that we simply don’t see these things happening around us? Remember the time, just a few years ago, when hundreds of elderly French people died in an intense heat-wave in the summer? They were so many their bodies had to be stored in refrigerated trucks. And some of them stayed there for months because, despite repeated public appeals, no one came forward to claim them. Was it a case of, ‘I don’t want to get involved’?
There are people in need all round us. They may be living next door. It could even be that a person in great need of human support and solidarity is in our own house, and sits at the kitchen table with us every day, and we don’t see them as they are. Instead of pointing a finger at others and saying what they should be doing, maybe we should look instead at ourselves and ask, ‘What am I doing?’
There’s an interesting story from the early Christians about a time when some people felt they were being left out when it came to sharing in aid provided for the poor. The community responded by choosing from their ranks seven people to provide for them. Those chosen were selected from the people with the grievance – a good way to resolve problems. Those early Christians saw a need and responded to it in their own way, a way suited to their time and place. The challenge to us is to do the same.
For those in a hurry: ‘Holiness is not an achievement brought about by will-power; it is a grace brought about by self-surrender.’ (Anon.)